The Paradox of Imagining the Post-Human World Fictional

This is the accepted manuscript of the article, which has been published in Narrative inquiry. 2019, 29(2), 371-390. https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19022.laa The Paradox of Imagining the Post-Human World Fictional and Factual Rhetorical Strategies in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us Maria Laakso, Tampere University Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, works depicting a post-human world have become a popular non-fiction genre. This kind of disanthropy is an extreme form of apocalyptic thinking. In this article, I examine one such disanthropic narrative, Alan Weisman’s bestselling non-fiction book The World Without Us (2007), using the theoretical framework of narrative fictionality studies. The World Without Us falls between the conventional oppositional pairing of factual and fictional narratives. The book bases its rhetoric heavily on scientific facts—or at least on scientific expectations—especially in its use of interviews with scientists. Nevertheless, the core idea of a world without humans is inevitably fictional since the presence of readers makes the book’s premise manifestly counterfactual and paradoxical. In my analysis, I adopt a rhetorical approach to fictionality and factuality to ask how particular techniques and strategies connected to fictionality and factuality are employed in Weisman’s text in order to discuss the anxieties, desires, hopes, and fears of the possibility of human extinction. Keywords: fictionality, factuality, thought-experiments, Anthropocene, referentiality Introduction Since the Industrial Revolution, human beings have had an observable impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Humans are responsible for—among other things—rising sea levels, the melting of the polar ice caps, and the extinction of many species. The present period of the planet’s history is often called the Anthropocene Age: the epoch of human impact on a geological scale (Trexler, 2015, pp. 1–2). The term “Anthropocene” has come to signify a cultural change, and it encompasses the many challenges entailed by the ongoing destabilization of the relations between nature and culture (Vermeulen, 2017, p. 868). As noted by Adam Trexler in Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015), anthropogenic climate change and the growing awareness of the human impact on the surrounding ecosystem have not only affected the planet but also literature, media, and other forms of cultural meaning making. The existing discourse of climate change has fundamentally shaped our culture over the last forty years. The idea of the Anthropocene and the growing awareness of global warming have had profound implications for nearly all our reference points in the world. Climate change alters the forms and potentialities of art, and shared cultural narratives and imaginative processes are fundamental to engaging with climate change. Despite all the existing scientific evidence, climate change has often been (and still is) approached as a contentious matter. For much of the twenty-first century, climate change has been the subject of many heated political debates, and the discussion has been dominated by issues of evidence, representation, and personal belief. Trexler (2015, pp. 2–5) notes that the Anthropocene as a concept productively shifts the emphasis from individual belief, thought, opinions, and choices to the larger scale, namely to human processes that have demonstrably occurred across cultures, economies, generations, and politics. In spite of the human imagination’s finite sense of place and time and our limited ability to feel empathy towards non-human nature, the non-human aspects of climate change can at least be discussed by emphasizing geological processes and observable changes to the planet. This growing non-human orientation of ecological thinking has also been manifested in the Western apocalyptic imaginary. “Apocalypse” refers to the end of the world, the end of time, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, and it has become one of the common ecological tropes in fiction. Some theorists even talk about the millennial obsession with the apocalypse (see eg., Barton, 2016, p. 5). Outside eschatological religious narrative texts, apocalypses hardly ever portray the complete end of the world. In modern apocalyptic narratives, the apocalypse is more likely to be some form of catastrophe (Heffernan, 2008, p. 6). Ecocritic Greg Garrard (2012) has termed the trope of the world after humans “disanthropy,” an extreme form of apocalyptic thinking. Disanthropic narratives are the result of a growing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and the possibility of the extinction of the human race in the future. The concept of a world without humans arguably dates back to the Romantic period with the publication of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which is widely considered one of the first post-apocalyptic novels. Early examples of disanthropy can also be found in modernist fiction, such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (Garrard, 2012, pp. 40–41). Nevertheless, since the Cold War, artistic anxieties concerning the complete annihilation of the human species appear to have intensified (see Kohlmann, 2013, p. 652). The first wave of these narratives was caused by fears of nuclear Armageddon, but it already contained the seeds of environmental awareness and post-humanist cultural theory (Kohlmann, 2013, pp. 664, 672). With the growing sense of climate change and the Anthropocene, the idea of a post-human world has also become more popular. Apocalyptic thinking has even become a popular undercurrent within non- fiction. Examples of the non-fiction genre include television series like the National Geographic Channel’s Aftermath: Population Zero (2008), the History Channel’s Life After People (2008, 2010), and Animal Planet’s The Future is Wild (2002). In this article, I focus on one particularly interesting example of disanthropic representation: Alan Weisman’s bestselling popular science book, The World Without Us (2007). It imagines an extreme version of an apocalyptic future, namely the world after the sudden extinction of humans. The premise of Weisman’s book is therefore fictional in the sense of being invented. The sudden disappearance of humans overnight is certainly artificial and thus, in this sense, a deeply unnatural scenario (on unnatural scenarios, see Alber, 2016, p. 43). Nevertheless, Weisman’s book mostly represents generic non-fiction. It is framed as non-fiction by its paratexts (for example, on the book’s back cover) and marketing, and it mostly follows the generic conventions of non-fiction (on the generic distinction between fiction and non-fiction, see Walsh, 2007, pp. 44–46). The status of The World Without Us as either fiction or non-fiction is therefore complicated. It imagines, predicts, and produces a future narrative world in which human life has disappeared, but bases this world on scientific fact, drawing on a wide range of evidence from scientists and other experts from fields including evolutionary biology, bacteriology, and radioecology. According to Trexler (2015, pp. 29–33), contemporary Anthropocene fictions often quite openly “incorporate” scientific facts into fiction. This is because the nature of the phenomenon of climate change is intangible: it is complex, fuzzy, and still partly contentious, so authors use scientific knowledge on the topic to make it understandable. Trexler argues that some literary strategies indicate the importance of science to Anthropocene fiction. The most visible strategy, for instance, is the frequent use of scientists as characters. The majority of novels about climate change include at least one scientist-character whose function is to enable writers to impart scientific information to readers in order to add believability to the speculation of such works. Trexler (2015, pp. 33–34) also notes that Anthropocene fiction has been interpreted by critics in two ways: the novels have been read either as more or less factual representations of climate change as a scientific phenomenon or as cultural texts that represent the collective imagination of the human impact on the environment. Both ways of reading fail to register the complexity of Anthropocene fiction, since climate change novels are a challenge to the conventional oppositional pairing of fact and fiction. As Trexler (2015, p. 71) puts it: “Climate change and climate change novels are neither fact nor ideation. Categorically impure, they are artifacts assembled from heterogeneous things in the world.” Trexler’s claims of categoric impurity could actually describe any fiction, because all fiction refers in one way or another to the real world outside fiction. Still, I consider his findings on the open uses of scientific facts in Anthropocene fiction valuable. The Anthropocene and climate change are phenomena that call for authors of fiction to lean on scientific knowledge in order to reinforce the assertiveness of their work, even though the generic frame remains fictional. The World Without Us does not narrate anthropogenic climate change per se, but rather envisions the assumed recovery of the planet and all its ecosystems after the disappearance of humans. Still, the starting point of the book is the human impact on the planet and its ecosystems: “we’ve poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included” (Weisman, 2007, p. 4). For this reason, it certainly belongs to Anthropocene literature, even though it represents generic non-fiction instead of the fiction that Trexler discusses. Whereas

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